No, U.S. Mole-Men Are Not Causing Haiti’s Earthquakes

Illo: Arikia Milikan

While I was in Haiti this past month, a 4.6 magnitude earthquake struck the country. There was no reported loss of life and no damage, thankfully. But there were an awful lot of odd theories about the origins of this quake — and the massive, 7.0 one that hit the country in 2010. The oddest of them all: the one about the giant tunnel that the U.S. was drilling under the Caribbean. Yeah, it’s Tinfoil Tuesday, our semi-regular look at the planet’s most wack-a-delic conspiracy theories.

At the time of the earthquake, my father, stepmother, little sister and I were sitting in the living room of their home in PetionVille, an eastern neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, our faces lit only by the yellowish glow of a kerosene lamp. The grid electricity had only flickered on for minutes over the previous three days, and the inverter battery that sustains the household electricity during the sporadic daily power failures had long since died, leaving us only with each other’s company for entertainment.

After the tremor, my stepmother started talking about this American deep-sea mining project she had heard about, to unite the Caribbean islands with a tunnel system.

“I don’t think they meant to trigger an earthquake, it was just an explosives accident from when they were building the tunnel,” she said.

“The tunnel?” I asked.

“Yes, the Caribbean Tunnel. It connects all the Caribbean islands with Florida and Venezuela. Aren’t you a journalist? How do you not know about the tunnel?”

I certainly would hope I would know about such a thing if it existed, so I excused myself and hurried off to use the last remaining bit of my phone battery to investigate the possibility of a secret tunnel being built beneath the Caribbean.

A simple Google search brought up descriptions of the “Caribbean Sea Tunnel,” otherwise known as the “Florida-Haiti Interstate Tunnel” or “I-95U,” a six-lane tunnel containing a high-speed rail system that floats 75 meters below the sea surface and spans 600 miles to connect southern Florida with Cap-Haïtien, a city on the northern tip of Haiti.

According to what appears to be the original article, hosted on the Constructed Worlds Wikia site, the Caribbean International Highway construction was featured on the Discovery Channel’s Extreme Engineering documentary series, and is a project organized by CARICOM, a multinational assemblage of Caribbean states. In addition to a tunnel from Florida to Haiti, the site claims that this tunnel is but one of the many segments within a network of underground tunnels connecting the United States with Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, the Bahamas, and eventually Venezuela.

Small problem: the project is a complete fake. The bold red text right on top of the Wikia page says so, literally: “ADVISORY: The Florida-Haiti Interstate Tunnel and the Caribbean International Highway project is fake. Please remain calm and view this article as an imaginary work of fiction.” Not enough of a disclaimer? Look up the source of the contribution, which is a Wikia page referencing the Union of Everett, a nation-state that geographically overlays the existing United States and supports a population of 252 million citizens with a capitol based in New York.

How did this online fantasy lead to a good number of well-educated Haitians believing that this tunnel exists and that it was the accidental cause of the earthquake in Haiti?

Well for one, the article was created on Feb. 10, 2010, only a month after the major 7.0 earthquake which caused search index volume for “haiti” to skyrocket. Also, the red advisory text was only added on Aug. 27, 2011, as is evident from checking the history of the Wiki. So this article existed online for over a year with no disclaimer, creating plenty of opportunity for people to see the fraudulent post and reblog it it without verifying the project with the Discovery Channel or CARICOM. (And reblog it and reblog it.)

Perpetuating the rumor still, the Discovery Channel does in fact have a website dedicated to the theoretical prospect of an Atlantic tunnel, but nowhere on the site does it say this project is under construction.

In a country where only the minority of people have the technological ability to verify a rumor as fact or fiction, the truth of an issue is often determined by what people want to believe. And with the United States’ notoriousreputation for stealth intervention to shape the political landscape in Haiti for its own interests, it makes for a convenient villain.

Looks like we’ll have to wait quite some time before we can hop on a lightrail to Venezuela (sorry, drug dealers), but at least this earthquake myth can be laid to rest once and for all.